No truth from torture

Date: April 27 2011

THE Guantanamo Bay dossiers on the Australians Mamdouh Habib and David Hicks, released by WikiLeaks, demonstrate two things. One is that, if tortured sufficiently or even indefinitely incarcerated, most people will eventually break, agreeing to admit to almost anything to avoid further pain. The second is that interrogators, if freed of the restraints imposed by common decency, the rules of evidence and judicial oversight, tend to believe what they want to believe of their captives. In Guantanamo Bay, the latter tendency was magnified by the extraterritorial isolation of the place and the horror of the terrorist attacks on New York's Twin Towers and Washington.

It is now clear that allegations on which the two Australians were held at the detention centre at the US naval base in Cuba were based on evidence that was often at best flimsy or unverified or, worse, tainted or plain wrong. A 2004 secret document from Guantanamo's commanding officer acknowledged that Habib's confessions while being held in Egyptian custody before being brought to Guantanamo - they included a plot to hijack a Qantas plane - had been made under ''extreme duress''. By Habib's account, this was a euphemism for sustained and brutal torture. The document says Habib subsequently denied all his ''confessions''. Nevertheless, the officer recommended he continue to be held because he was ''a high risk and of high intelligence value''. Five months later, Habib was released without charges being laid.

The Hicks document paints a similarly inflated,

if not downright fanciful, picture of his significance, accusing him of links with various terrorist organisations and describing him as ''a highly skilled and advanced combatant, as well as a valuable asset and possible leader for extremist organisations''. One published report says the document even declares - wholly mistakenly, it seems - that in 1999 Hicks flew from Kosovo to take part in the conflict in East Timor. Does the old joke that military intelligence is an oxymoron have a grain of truth to it after all?

Still, having pleaded guilty to providing ''material support'' to terrorism and having served nine months' prison in Adelaide, Hicks has put Guantanamo behind him. Unfortunately, the US still has not. Despite the good intentions of President Barack Obama, there are still 172 people detained there, waiting to be transferred to other countries - as about 600 already have been - or, perhaps, tried. Overall, it seems that the majority of those sent to Guantanamo were low-ranking foot soldiers or innocent bystanders caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is an ugly story.

Our two-stage refugee test

THE Immigration Minister, Chris Bowen, is being criticised by the left and the right about his proposed change to laws about refugee visas, allowing him to deny permanent residency to anyone convicted of a criminal offence during their time in immigration detention centres. Unfortunately, his critics raise many valid points: it is unclear that what he proposes will help settle the rising pressures in our system of processing asylum claims. It gives every appearance of policy on the run, reeling from incident to incident.

Certainly, Bowen is responding to widespread public anger at asylum seekers rioting and setting fire to buildings in the detention camps at Christmas Island and Villawood. As minister responsible, he must also be dismayed at destruction of accommodation that will make overcrowding even more of a problem in what remains of the centres. As current legislation denies permanent protection visas only to those given a criminal sentence of a year or more's jail, Bowen wants the trigger to be any criminal conviction. The alternative he suggests for those deemed to have failed this ''character test'' is a temporary visa, subject to revocation at the government's discretion.

But this puts such asylum seekers back in the limbo his own government ended in 2008 for humanitarian reasons. And what happens then? The system is devolving into a two-stage test for asylum seekers. First they have to show a genuine risk of persecution in their homeland, entitling them to claim protection as a refugee. Then they have to pass an endurance test of confinement in a remote and crowded detention without cracking.

The first process is a lengthening one. Labor came to office setting a guideline of 90 days for assessing asylum claims. The average processing time is now many months longer than that. The second trial is one hard to assess, chiefly since the handling of the detention centres has been outsourced from government to private security operators. Clearly it is causing some inmates to explode in destructive protests.

Some of the protesters are people who have had their claims to refugee status rejected. We learn of one Iranian man at Villawood rejected, while his brother who arrived on the same boat has been accepted as a refugee and is out in the community. Is it not possible for the public to have some explanation, to make decisions less opaque and arbitrary-looking? And where asylum claims are rejected, why is deportation not more speedy? But is mandatory detention - the shibboleth neither side of politics wants to question - itself the problem?

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